I like the idea in general, I just recommend caution in evaluating whether the LW is declining. I mean, it’s obvious from the context of this thread that many people feel so, however...
There was a time when Eliezer wrote a new article every day, for a year. And I loved reading those articles, but writing them was not how Eliezer wanted to spend the rest of his life, so it is natural that he gradually stopped. This feels like a decline from the “less new cool stuff to read every day” point of view. But on the other hand… all the stuff Eliezer wrote, it’s still there. We are not in a newspaper business, the old copies are not automatically thrown away, and don’t have to be repeated every year. It’s collected to the e-book now (by the way, how’s the progress there?). There is CFAR as a separate organization; they do seminars. There are meetups in many countries around the world.
What I’m saying is that the important part is the rationalist movement, not merely its website. If people at meetups actually accomplish something, that is more awesome than debating online. So we shouldn’t judge the whole thing only by the daily number of new articles in the Discussion. Ironically, the fact that until recently the Discussion page was cluttered by meetup announcements was a signal of success (and of a bad design—which later got fixed). Now, if the number of LW meetups were declining, that would be something to worry about; and I didn’t look at specific numbers.
I like the idea in general, I just recommend caution in evaluating whether the LW is declining. I mean, it’s obvious from the context of this thread that many people feel so, however...
There was a time when Eliezer wrote a new article every day, for a year. And I loved reading those articles, but writing them was not how Eliezer wanted to spend the rest of his life, so it is natural that he gradually stopped. This feels like a decline from the “less new cool stuff to read every day” point of view. But on the other hand… all the stuff Eliezer wrote, it’s still there. We are not in a newspaper business, the old copies are not automatically thrown away, and don’t have to be repeated every year. It’s collected to the e-book now (by the way, how’s the progress there?). There is CFAR as a separate organization; they do seminars. There are meetups in many countries around the world.
What I’m saying is that the important part is the rationalist movement, not merely its website. If people at meetups actually accomplish something, that is more awesome than debating online. So we shouldn’t judge the whole thing only by the daily number of new articles in the Discussion. Ironically, the fact that until recently the Discussion page was cluttered by meetup announcements was a signal of success (and of a bad design—which later got fixed). Now, if the number of LW meetups were declining, that would be something to worry about; and I didn’t look at specific numbers.